New – SMTP Support for the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

We have added an SMTP interface to the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to make it even easier for you to send transactional or bulk email. We’ve had a lot of requests for this feature and I am confident that it will be really popular. There’s a new SMTP item in the SES tab of the AWS Management Console:

This items leads to a page containing all of the information that you need to have in order to make use of SMTP with SES:

You no longer need to write any code to gain the efficiency and deliverability benefits of SES. Instead, you use the SES tab of the AWS Management Console to create an SMTP user and a set of credentials, and then you use those credentials to configure the email client of your choice:

This simple process also creates an IAM user with the appropriate permissions and policies. Credentials in hand, you can configure your mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, and so forth) to use SMTP for mail delivery.

You will still need to verify the source (“from”) addresses that you plan to use to send email, and you’ll also need to request production access in order to increase your sending limits. You can initiate both of these tasks from the console:

The newest version of the SES Developer Guide includes a new section on the SMTP interface, with complete directions for configuring SMTP client apps, packaged software, application code (including a PHP + MySQL example), and server-side mail transfer agents (MTAs) including Sendmail, Postfix, and Exim.